and this was a taskforce that was set up in the pentagon. and it was designed to track war crimes cases in the wake of the exposure of the my lai massacre. >> where 500 men, women, and children were murdered by american g.i.s. >> that's right. the military basically, what they wanted to do was make sure they were never caught flatfooted again by an atrocity scandal. so in the army chief of staff's office, there were a number of army colonels who worked to track all war crimes allegations that bubbled up into the media that gis and recently returned veterans were making public. and they tracked all these. and whenever they could, they tried to tamp down these allegations. >> your book is very important to me. i was there at the white house in the 1960s when president johnson escalated the war. my own great regret is that i didn't see the truth of the war in time didn't see what was happening there. and yet, as i said, you didn't even come to the experience until after it was all over. and yet you have become obsessed with telling this story.